What is the Purpose of Education?

My grandfather, Michael Patrick Conlon (back, 4th from right) with his class in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland, c. 1919

What is the purpose of education?, and, in particular, what is the purpose of a K-12 education? I know this might sound like a stupid question, but it’s not. Furthermore, I’m not sure many people really know what the purpose of an education is, or, if they do, on closer examination they might find that their assumptions about it are gravely mistaken, if not entirely incoherent.

Educational theorist Kieran Egan (who, sadly, left us in May of 2022) clearly articulated this incoherence in a number of books, most notably in The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding (1997)—and it is an incoherence not merely of the general population but of the educational establishment itself. For Egan, three “old ideas” haunt contemporary educational paradigms and these ideas, often mixed together awkwardly, have aims completely incompatible with each other. These incompatible ideas are based on what he identifies as commitments to: 1) Socialization; 2) Rousseau and Nature’s Guidance; and 3) Plato and the Truth about Reality.

We can all identify the socialization project. When I was a boy in Catholic school during the 1970s not only was this ethos promulgated by the daily prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance with which we began each school day, but also through weekly Mass attendance, and the ungodly punishment of The Baltimore Catechism for Children, a book that has arguably created more atheists than either Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. More recently, we can see Project Socialization in the relentless instruction (okay, “indoctrination”) students have in public schools (and even in a good number of parochial schools) that gender “is on a spectrum” and that “structural racism” is built into the very fabric of western democracies. And don’t even get me started on the drag queen-ification of public schooling. You get the picture: socialization.

When it comes to Rousseau and Nature’s Guidance, contemporary educational models, in addition to socialization, seek to trust the child’s natural instincts and let him or her discover the world somehow organically, as we can see in the unschooling movement favored by some homeschoolers or in various educational experiments like Montessori (to some degree) or the Summerhill School in England. In this model, the education is intended to fit the child instead of the child fitting the system. Considering the systems available, it is not the worst idea one might encounter. In more mainstream settings, the Rousseauean project can be seen in the overemphasis on the child or student and his or her experiences, particularly in the overemphasis of the personal narrative in writing studies. The danger, of course, is that education then becomes a fostering in narcissism and self-absorption, seen nowhere so evidently as in the postmodern fascination with social media and turning oneself into a brand.

With Plato and the Truth about Reality, we find an education that is content-heavy and its aims are to create free individuals able to think independently of the crowd. This approach is often favored by those of a conservative inclination and often a reintroduction of Latin and of the classical Trivium and the Quadrivium accompany this commitment. Unfortunately, a kind of bunker mentality also often haunts this project to the point where it becomes a kind of cosplay that looks like a romanticization of the British public school system, as if the system of history’s long-lost elites is the template for human progress and can save us from the snares of postmodern secularism. But the platonic model is also a feature of the venerable college preparatory schools that tend to lean more to the liberal side of the political spectrum. It’s a system bent on creating tomorrow’s elite class, but I think the family money and prestige that make such an education accessible have far more import on creating a future ruling class than do the study of Aristotle, Virgil, or Shakespeare. And I probably don’t need to mention that Plato’s original model had a fifty-year-long syllabus.

Whatever the case, we can see, as Egan points out, that these three educational paradigms are completely at odds with each other. One can’t have a system committed to both socialization and creating free-thinking, independent agents. Nether is socialization comportable with trusting the child’s instincts (seriously, is participating in a drag show ever a childlike instinct?). And we can’t have a school system focused on a content-heavy curriculum that is also directed toward self-actualization. Yet, in the main and across the board, we do have such a school system. And it’s a disaster.

Egan proposes a new way of thinking about the way to map education that is none these. Instead, he maps a way of structuring curricula based on what he sees as stages of understanding found in children as they grow and mature. He names these somatic understanding, mythic understanding, romantic understanding, philosophic understanding, and ironic understanding. While it is not my intention to lay out his entire philosophy, I will briefly describe what he means by these terms.

Somatic understanding is the kind of understanding, pre-verbal, particular to infants. It’s connected to the body and its way of unconsciously coming to terms with its environment and its self-awareness, even if unconscious.

Mythic understanding is the kind of understanding exhibited by small children, pre-K to about age eight or nine. Egan points to how such children have an almost magical interaction with the world and think in deeply imaginative ways, contrary to John Dewey’s demonstrably false assertion that children of this age are “concrete thinkers.” One wonders if Dewey ever met any actual children.

Following the mythic stage comes romantic understanding. Romantic understanding, according to Egan, is that stage (ages 9-13 or so) when children become fascinated with mega ergon and the limits of human potential. Think how boys of this age are often interested in achievements in sports, world records, or even whether a person can have three legs, not to mention conjoined twins. Coupled with this is an attraction for the heroic—King Arthur, for example, or Florence Nightingale, or Martin Luther King, Jr. Lucy Maude Montgomery, herself a rural schoolteacher in early 20th century Prince Edward Island, in the Anne of Green Gables series, illustrates how central romantic understanding is to children of this age via her heroine, a girl who possesses a remarkable “scope for imagination.” Indeed, Anne of Green Gables is a veritable handbook for teaching children (and I have assigned it to students in education courses for precisely this reason).

With philosophic understanding, the student moves into thinking in systems as a way to situate and comprehend the complexities of the self in relationship to society. This is a kind of understanding seen particularly in high school students when young people often take up this or that world view as a lens for interpreting, well, everything. Anyone who’s ever met a sixteen-year-old witch, a twelfth-grade Communist, or a fifteen-year-old atheist will know exactly what Egan is talking about; and one has to wonder if the trans ideology currently infecting so many high school kids is not also a part of the phenomenon Egan observes.

At last, the young reach the stage of ironic understanding, which could also be called Socratic understanding. At this stage, the systems taken up in the previous stage are called into question as anomalies implicit to the system are introduced and, we might say, real thinking arrives. This stage arrives, typically, in early years of college, though Egan suggests that not everybody is up to the task of interrogating their assumptions in a very serious way. That used to be what college was for, of course, though it is a very rare commodity in the current ideological landscape.

Egan also hints at the notion of spiritual understanding, though I don’t think he ever developed it to any significant degree. Though a former Franciscan novice, he identified (as far as I can tell) as an atheist, but Pythagorean and Platonic notions of a moral life were profoundly important to him.

What I find attractive about Egan’s model is that it is not ideologically driven but based on a kind of anthropology, a schematic of human cognitive development that is deeply phenomenological in its approach. Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner likewise maintained sound anthropologies in their educational projects and I think the success in their approaches is directly related to the ways in which they viewed human development.

But back to our question: what is the purpose of education? I would suggest that the purpose of education is to make us more fully human. Certainly, the realization of such an ideal depends on what one thinks a human being is. I’m no Hobbesian; and while I see plenty of evidence in the world that man is a thoroughly immoral, cruel, and sadistic creature, I still hold to the divine image of man grounded in the Christian tradition and promulgated from thinkers from Goethe to Schiller and from Traherne to Blake (among many others). That said, my operating assumption is that, fallen though we be, human beings are essentially good and that education’s aim should be at gaining as much as possible of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as we wander through what Keats called “the vale of soul-making.” A Classical curriculum certainly operates under such an assumption, and I lament that even the lip service once paid to the rich cultural inheritance of the West in college courses in Western Civilization or Western Humanities have entirely evaporated in the dry winds of wokeness. But I also worry that the current counter-trend of “the Classical Academy,” often distributed along franchise means (!), offers too arid an environment for the promise of human flourishing.

In my thirty years of teaching experience—everything from kindergarten to graduate school, including homeschooling my own children—I have found that the educational models available to us are enormously inefficient. Basically, schools are holding cells created to monitor (and, often, propagandize) children while parents are at work. That is, schools are outgrowths of the factory model, replete with bells telling children when to start, when to stop, when to eat, and when to defecate. It’s Pavlovian. My own children follow a modified Waldorf-Classical curriculum, but their school day usually ends by noon, with maybe a little math or reading practice after lunch. The problem, I think, is the over-emphasis on the intellect, not that the intellect is a bad thing. But our highly technologized culture is nothing if not intensely intellect-based. That is, it takes place almost entirely in the head; and education, where even useful skills such as handwriting are in the process of atrophy if not abandonment, is not any different.

In the age of the Classical curriculum—when it wasn’t a weapon in a culture war but the foundation for any education in the West—people were not captived by the technological snares in which we are all so enmeshed. Instead, they were ensconced in the Real—in the world of plants, animals, clouds, birds, rivers, art, music, sound. An education in the intellect, then, was a supplement to the human-making properties of the Real. What is missing from education now, whether in a socialization, Rousseauean, or Platonic model—is reality. And it is only through the Real that we can create the Human. Otherwise, we are merely simulacra of the human.

In my book Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything, I proposed the idea of a “Postmodern Sophiological Hedge School.” The Irish hedge schools that inspired me were clandestine, makeshift schools devised to educate Irish children in their own religion, language, and culture and not by the classical conditioning of the state-sponsored institutions of their British overlords. (The “flying universities” in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War worked to very much the same end.) In my book, I propose what that might look like in our own cultural and civilizational context:

“The hedge school would create an environment in which the morning could be devoted to studies in the traditional sense (the three R’s, languages), but, as Steiner demanded, they should be taught artistically. No textbooks. No computers (at least before the age of fourteen). No ugly and utilitarian classrooms filled with ugly and utilitarian furniture and an ugly and utilitarian curriculum. Only engagement with what is real: color and sound, beauty and presence, human interaction and contemplation. That means that students would need time to think or, better, time for reverie in addition to time for instruction. Afternoons could then be devoted to developing practical and artistic skills. In the classical Irish hedge school, such would be redundant; in our own time, they are absolutely vital.

“The recalibration of the human ego to participation in the Real is fundamental to my conception of the postmodern sophiological hedge school. There could be many varieties of hedge school, but without participation in the Real, they would only be adaptations of the educational superego that permeates the culture. My claim is that a way of learning imbued with the arts and engaged with practical activities combined with a contemplative ethos provides a corrective to the human soul done serious damage by a culture characterized by the technology, isolation, and synthetic media that insulate human persons from nature, the cosmos, and, ultimately, from God.”

Clearly, there is more to education than the imparting of information (a data set) or than the forming of citizens (depending on what kinds citizens the Archons desire). As William Butler Yeats observed, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” And that fire is the fire of the Spirit.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

The Dutch Farmers v. the Technocrats / Sophia v. Ahriman

Back in February I published a blogpost entitled “The Canadian Peasants’ Revolt” about the Canadian trucker convoy and their protest in Ottawa (amongst other places) in the Great White North. What has happened in Canada is indeed stunning as well as heartbreaking. Popular podcaster Joe Rogan recently called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “f*cking dictator” and he is not incorrect. What’s going on behind the Maple Curtain is mind-blowing—and Tamara Lich is still in jail on trumped up charges. O Canada.

While the truckers’ protest may have ended for a time, their spirit has not been extinguished. Recently, for example, Dutch farmers have been protesting draconian climate gerrymandering of their government that seeks to close farms and seize property. They’ve brought tractors to the protest instead of the traditional pitchforks, but you get the idea. In one instance at least, they planted a Canadian flag in the center of a town to symbolize their solidarity with and inspiration of the Canadian truckers. The farmers are not having it and have closed down borders and city centers throughout their country. It really goes without saying that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, like his Canadian counterpart Trudeau (not to mention New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and many others) is a protégé of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, whose primary funder is Bill Gates. I guess yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s political reality. But it doesn’t need to stay that way. It won’t.

What has really struck me in the images coming out of The Netherlands of the protest is the symbolic nature of the farmers in opposition to the technocracy. In my book Transfiguration and elsewhere I have described this as the battle between Sophia and Ahriman, not that Sophia is a warrior (that is actually St. Michael the Archangel’s job—and I encourage you to invoke his protection in these evil times). The farmers, people connected to the land and the seasons, represent Sophia and the technocrats who seek to destroy them represent Ahriman. I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far, but, as with the Canadian truckers, this is a protest with a long pedigree going back to the enclosure riots of the 16th and 17th centuries—a protest of the common man against the machinations of the elites. And, at root, this is a spiritual battle. The spirit of Gerrard Winstanley, both prophet and journeyman, overshadows these protests—which have now spread to Germany, Italy, Canada (again) and other places and will within short order, I think, arrive in the United States. In fact, a worldwide protest is planned for July 23rd:

Winstanley’s words from A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England (1649) are just as poignant now as when he wrote them:

“The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.”

That is, what the Dutch government and their counterparts in other countries and the WEF are after is a new form of enclosure. It’s the same old game, what E.P. Thompson described as “a plain enough case of highway robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a Parliament of property-owners and lawyers.” And need I remind anyone that Bill Gates has been sucking up farmland like a drunkard at last call? I sincerely hope it is last call for him and his breed.

I have not yet mentioned Sri Lanka, which has fallen into chaos, causing the country’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign. Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas has also just resigned, and this follows upon the resignation announcements of Italian PM Mario Draghi and British PM Boris Johnson, not to mention the assassination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. Maybe these things are related, maybe they’re not. But I am certainly watching. As should we all be.

These are dangerous times. Recently, one of my oldest and dearest friends came to me in tears about the status of the world, telling me that she only wants for me and my children and grandchild to be safe. I want us all to be safe, but we’re up against a profound (and profoundly organized) kind of evil.

Unfortunately, what we’re seeing play out now on the world stage is something I saw coming years ago, though I must admit it has arrived much earlier than I thought it would. In Transfiguration, I end with the following warning, which seems now even more pressing than when I published it:

“But there must be a place for human agency in this eschatology: free will demands as much. As Berdyaev prophesied, “Either a new epoch in Christianity is in store for us and a Christian renaissance will take place, or Christianity is doomed to perish—although this cannot for a moment be admitted, since we know that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’” Christians all too often operate under the assumption that God will show up in the nick of time in order to save us from ultimate catastrophe; but world history, especially that of the twentieth century, begs to differ (a point that Death of God theology brought to our embarrassed attention). Likewise with the enveloping darkness of the technological colonization of the human person: don’t for a second think that God will prevent us from letting this happen to ourselves. It’s already happening. We’re letting it happen.

“Sophia awakens only when we awaken to her. And this is the task of Christians in this age: to awaken ourselves and those who dwell upon this earth with us to the sophianic reality of Creation. We can choose to do nothing. We can simply let things progress and see how it ends. But, whatever the case, Christians need to own their complicity in creating the world in which we now live. We did this. To hide behind the bulwark of a reactionary fear, hoping to raise the glory of Christendom once again from its ashes, or to reduce the Christian mystery to a palliative social program or variation on the group-therapy model: these are missions for fools. In Berdyaev’s damning assessment:

‘The world is living in a period of agony which greatly resembles that of the end of antiquity. But the present situation is more hopeless, since at the close of antiquity Christianity entered the world as a new young force, while now Christianity, in its human age, is old and burdened with a long history in which Christians have often sinned and betrayed their ideal. And we shall see that the judgment upon history is also a judgment upon Christianity in history.’

“There is no place to which to retreat. Nothing to preserve. Nothing to restore. There is only the future, the eschaton, the parousia which is always/already here. Let us embrace it.”

Be not afraid.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

Vernacular Sacraments

As anyone familiar with my work would know, mine is an inherently sacramental worldview. That is, I see divinity as capable of disclosing itself and administering grace through the material elements of the cosmos. This disclosure comes by way of the natural world and its subsidiarities—the arts, liturgy, scripture, and so forth, and even the realms of speech and ideas. The disclosure, of course, is not assured, nor is it programmatic. It doesn’t happen in every circumstance. But we have all experienced it.

For sacramentally-minded Christians (I’m thinking primarily of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican iterations), the primary locus for such a phenomenon is the Eucharist, with Baptism and Chrismation /Confirmation standing in close proximity. So, possessing such a sensibility, I found myself very disturbed when bishops of every stripe denied the Eucharist to millions (perhaps billions) of Christians throughout a sizable amount of the past two years, even to the point of canceling masses, feast days—Christmas and Easter not the least of them—and removing the “Sunday obligation” and accompanying mortal sin that allegedly comes from skipping church. When the bishops finally decided the political coast was clear, they reinstated the Sunday obligation. But by then they’d lost me. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The madness even reached the point at which many Catholic parishes (and I’m sure the same is true with the Orthodox and Anglicans) unvaccinated parishioners were barred from the sacraments, in what seems to be the most blatantly unchristian move imaginable. The Vatican (not that I was surprised) even instated a vaccine mandate for all employees and visitors. I even know an Episcopalian priest who was denied a post as a pastor for being unjabbed.

Now that we know for certain (as many did much earlier, but were decried as “anti-science” or conspiracy theorists) that the vaccines are worthless at either preventing infection or spread (and that “it would have been much worse without” canard is absolutely risible if not contemptible)—and we know for certain they lead to harm or death for some people—such clerical moves prove themselves only to be tragic, but a tragedy that has devolved into farce. But no one has apologized from what I’ve noticed. No one.

Having been accompanied on most of my life as a Catholic Christian by the specter of child sex abuse (one of the pastors at my boyhood parish was one of the most notorious abusers in the history of American Catholicism) I am very familiar with the evils of clericalism and have for many years had some serious doubts about the fairytale that the Holy Spirit selects the bishops, cardinals, and popes. In fact, when my book Transfiguration was in production in 2018 and the McCarrick scandal erupted—a scandal Rod Dreher and my friend Larry Chapp had known and warned about for years but were ignored—I wanted to change the subtitle from “Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything,” so filled was I by outrage and shame. But I didn’t, alas. Then Notre Dame burned during Holy Week of 2019. And this was all before the world was turned upside-down in 2020.

After living in the shadows of a church gone mad in the midst of a society gone mad for nearly a year, having missed the celebration of Christmas and Easter by governmental decree greeted with clerical approval—and with school-age children still at home—I decided to take matters into my own hands: we started a house church, replete with the celebration of the Eucharist (and one baptism). This was nothing I ever imagined myself doing; it was not something I desired or sought. But I definitely felt the spirit of the Lord beckoning me to not let my children starve from the Eucharist due to the politics and fears of weak or malicious men.

It is my understanding that Ivan Illich thought this was where the Church was headed and that he thought it a welcome development. Illich speaks much about “vernacular” phenomena—in gender, work, and so forth—in his work and it made me start thinking about the notion of vernacular sacraments, which is what I see to be the issue here. But I don’t really feel the need for the rhetorical appeal to authority on this score. The children need to be fed.

Surreptitiously, this morning I found a Substack post by my friend, Tara Ann Thieke, in my junk folder (sorry, Tara! I don’t know what happened!) in which she shared these words of comfort on the Eucharist by our mutual friend, Rudolf Steiner: “An understanding of the world is only present today when a transubstantiation is carried out at an altar.” This line well-captures my gradual movement into the realm of house church: for I know this is the only way to understand the world, and I refuse to have my children denied it.

Of course, some may say that churches have stepped back from vaxx and mask mandates and requirements. Well, good for them. Still haven’t seen any apologies. I know a good number of my friends are disappointed in what I’ve been doing, but not one of them has said so to me personally. But when you know you know. But none of that concerns me now. Friendship has its place, but that doesn’t concern me now. What concerns me is standing in the light of God, dependent on His grace which is freely given and not dependent on a set of credentials or licensure. This may mean I’m excommunicated. But that doesn’t concern me now.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.